1959: The Emerging Puppet Master ....

While we have chosen to adopt the well-documented life and times of Herbert W. Armstrong as one of the 'pebbles' that began a serious of ripples in this recital of past events, it is now necessary to introduce the person who became his Puppet Master. That person is Stanley Robert Rader.

Stan Rader died in 2002, thus terminating a life of 70 years. But in the year 1959 he was just beginning to emerge from the shadows, and into the public life of Herbert W. Armstrong.

Rader was born on August 13, 1930 in White Plains, New York. He was the junior of Herbert W. Armstrong who was born on July 31, 1892 in Des Moines, Iowa.

Armstrong's parents subscribed to the Quaker faith. Rader was born to parents of the Jewish faith.

​The year before Herbert W. Armstrong first arrived at Copenhagen, Denmark to see the manager of 'Radio Mercur', Stanley Robert Rader was being introduced in the 1959 Yearbook of Armstrong's Ambassador College at Pasadena, California, by the picture shown above. The Yearbook represented events during the preceding twelve months, and in 1958, as a Chartered Public Accountant, he was identified as the financial auditor and advisor serving the institutions of Armstrong's Church and College.

However, Rader's public emergence did not reflect his initial media beginnings concerning the relationship that would gradually turn the tables on Armstrong like a lobster being slowly boiled to death. Events would gradually put Rader in charge of both Armstrong's Church and his College.

Rader then attempted, without a lot of success, to quieten down both institutions as to what he was really setting out to do, which was to morph the assets of the Church and the College into a spectacular secular foundation. It would be that new institution which engaged with world leaders while at the same time, bedazzling the world of cultural entertainment.

For a time, he actually 'pulled it off'!

Rader had taken advice given to Armstrong since the Forties to become a political and cultural radio commentator, of which there had been many in the past, and many in his future. But Armstrong resisted until Rader showed Armstrong that it was not a question of one or the other, he could do both!

As he approached the zenith of his ambitions, Stanley R. Rader made a lot of enemies who tried to destroy him. This led to a very public legal war which Rader turned into a debate about the meaning of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as it applied to State laws. For a short time thereafter, Rader emerged as the victor and he even got the University of Southern California Gould School of Law to create a Chair for the 'Herbert W. Armstrong Professor of Constitutional Law, Emeritus'!

In other words, the life and times of Herbert W. Armstrong came to influence the ordinary lives of millions of people on this Planet. But most people had no idea that Armstrong was the servant of a Puppet Master named Stanley Robert Rader. In fact, it took many years for Armstrong to realize that Rader had become his real life but secular "Guiding Hand", and by then, it was too late.

Rader's life had already come to an end, and Armstrong's was swiftly fading out of existence.

Tomorrow, how the paths of Rader and Armstrong collided, and how the Rader-Armstrong story developed from there.

---